Magerman told the Wall Street Journal that Mercer’s political opinions “show contempt for the social safety net that he doesn’t need, but many Americans do.” He also said that Mercer wants the U.S. government to be “shrunk down to the…
Noted & Quoted
Extended spider cognition – SpringerLink
To tease apart the central from the extended cognition, we apply the mutual manipulability criterion, testing the existence of reciprocal causal links between the putative elements of the system. We conclude that the web threads and configurations are integral parts…
Nuke test films digitized in the nick of time – CNN.com
Over a period of about 20 years after the end of World War II, the US conducted 210 atmospheric nuclear tests. Each was captured by multiple cameras, rolling at around 2,400 frames per second.A handful of the estimated 10,000 mesmerizing…
David Brooks: Let Bannon Be Bannon! – The New York Times
[T]he Trump budget looks less like a political philosophy and more like a sexual fantasy. It lavishes attention on every aspect of hard power and slashes away at anything that isn’t.
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness
Trump Offers No Apology for Claim on British Spying – The New York Times
The conspiracy theorizing also tested what is often called the special relationship between the United States and Britain. American intelligence agencies enjoy a closer collaboration with their British counterparts than any other in the world. GCHQ was the first agency…
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness
Eric Levitz: The Case for Countering Trumpism With ‘Left-Wing Economics’ – New York
Maybe America’s racial history makes it uniquely hostile to redistributive fiscal policy. But the Republican Party’s brand of economic conservatism is also uniquely extreme, unpopular, and ill-equipped to meet the demands of our second Gilded Age — as the current…
Scientists Finally Observed Time Crystals, But What the Hell Are They? – Gizmodo
One group at the University of Maryland lined up ten trapped ytterbium ions (ytterbium is just a chemical element) and shined them with periodic laser pulses to mostly, but not completely, flip the ions’ spins. The particles’ spin values snapped…
Sharon Weinberger: How nuclear fears helped inspire creation of the internet – Aeon Essays
‘How much money do you need to get off the ground?’ Herzfeld asked. ‘A million dollars or so, just to get it organised,’ Taylor replied. ‘You’ve got it,’ Herzfeld replied. And that was it. The conversation to approve the money…
NASA proposes building artificial magnetic field to restore Mars’ atmosphere – ExtremeTech
Green notes that advances coming out of plasma physics could allow for the future development of inflatable structures that can generate a magnetic dipole of 1 or 2 tesla. That could [be] enough to shield Mars against the solar wind,…
@CarpenterPM: …Trump will be knifed by his own party – p m carpenter’s commentary
Trump’s spectacles… are swiftly gobbling up the time that Republicans thought they possessed. In a mere seven weeks, their president has become a national joke. And he can’t change, because he’s diseased. He will, therefore, soon also become an existential…
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness